Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 29, 2023 4:56 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 2:12 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 5:19 am
Perhaps an appropriate way to view all of this is via the mathematical concept of projection - reducing a higher dimensional space to a lower one. In terms of our day-to-day experience, we can similarly think of a 3-dimensional object casting a 2-D shadow onto the ground. In either case the projected image has lost information in relation to the higher dimensional counterpart.
We can agree that the various spiritual concepts have layers of meaning or depth. They lie in a high dimensional space. But my contention is that the RCC (and other denominations/communions) have mapped these meanings into a lower dimensional space, a crystallized space, where the meaning has been largely lost and most likely distorted. This latter is captured in the creeds and dogmas and is the space the exoteric churches operate in. It is the space which declares esotericism as heretical.
But you seem to be arguing that the richer meaning can be resurrected from the ashes of the projection after the information has been lost. In the mathematical world, this is known to be impossible.
Anthony,
The bold is the heart and soul of Christianity and what Christ accomplished for us, is it not? Our entire known personality is a 'projection' in the same sense. I'm not even sure it's impossible in the mathematical world, since there is the
holographic principle which says all of 3D reality can be recovered from a 2D hologram.
The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon
If there is anything I have been trying to convey about the creeds and dogmas of the RCC, it's that they should not be treated essentially differently from any other natural or cultural forms that have been flattened and encrusted in the modern age through
our habits of thinking. Every form has an ideal archetype that emanates from the top-down, through human I-consciousness, and into the manifest world. The distortion always occurs in our particular mode of thinking, habits of soul, and myopic perspective rather than the ideal archetype itself. We need to learn to look upon even the forms that we find very disturbing or disagreeable as manifestations of ideal archetypes that are quite independent of human intellectual consciousness and that we have distorted through the latter. The process of redemption can only come from
retracing the process of descent, first in our thinking consciousness and later through the soul, life, and physical spaces. That is not only the heart of the Christian faith but also the heart of esoteric science.
St. Paul wrote:Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear...
Through faith... Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11)
The creeds and dogmas were not made by human concepts 'which do appear' from the bottom-up but through top-down ideal impulses which are 'not seen'. We should try to notice what we are subtly doing in our thinking when we locate the source of problems in the creeds and dogmas and traditions themselves, which is similar to the spiritualist/mystic/fundamentalist who locates the source of problems in the perceptual world and the physical body. Practically, we are forsaking our faith in the Spirit that lives in our thinking consciousness and is alone capable of redeeming the ashes of the World from the deserts, dens, and caves of the modern age. These things remain pretty abstract until we also explore concrete examples through our imaginative and intuitive thinking. I previously shared an example of a dogma that I had found disagreeable and even irredeemable to some extent, i.e. that of the Virgin Birth. At that time, I was thinking that it could only refer to the purity of Mary's soul and had nothing to do with the biological process of reproduction, i.e. it couldn't be the case that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus.
Ashvin wrote:Here is a simple example - that of the 'virgin birth'. The evangelicals dogmatically hold that the Bible teaches Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of the Jesus child. Yet when we look at the actual content of the Gospels, particularly Luke and Matthew, we find genealogies traced out in great detail for the precise purpose of showing how the lineages of Jesus go through Jospeh (and another father, since there were in fact two Jesus children to begin with). What would be the point of all that if Joseph actually had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus? We don't need clairvoyant perception here, just simple and sound reasoning. Do the critical scholars fare any better? No, they hold to the exact same dogmatic interpretation and then use that as a reason for dismissing the content, because it is absurd that a human child could be physically born without a human father. So the evangelicals and critical scholars are arguing over their own dogmatic illusions and the actual content has fallen by the wayside. We will find the same thing applies to many other aspects of scripture as well.
The above is not necessarily incorrect, but I have since intuited with the help of Tomberg that the dogma of the Virgin Birth is not so simple. There is a biological dimension to it that indeed makes it unique from all other human births and is entirely aligned with esoteric science. I can't really go into the details of that because it is still a hazy intuition for me that I cannot usefully condense into conceptual terms. I think it would take quite a few posts to meaningfully convey what I am referring to. Suffice it to say, what I wrote above was equally an expression of my own cognitive limitations as it was of the shortcomings of the Christian faithful who hold fast to the Virgin Birth dogma or the skeptics who believe such a dogma clearly has a biological component. I was separating out the "biological" from the spiritual in an unwarranted manner. These are things we need to pay attention to and strive to overcome through faith in our living spiritual principles of redemption and resurrection. Our Hope is in the fact that even the densest, most hardened thing of all, our physical bodies and mineral nature, is being raised back to life through us.
We usually feel that the esoteric understanding of the Christ events and scripture is something more recent, added on top of the "traditional" dogmas of the Church, but that's an inversion. The esoteric understanding came first and only later hardened into exoteric forms. That is how the progression goes for all natural and cultural developments - things are occultly prepared and then outwardly manifested. But the esoteric stream continued throughout the centuries of Christian history and we find more or less direct references to it in the theological writings of the
saints of the RCC. We mentioned Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and John of the Cross already, and could add many more names to that list (I realize not all of them were deemed saints by the Church). Who is to say that the creeds and dogmas are to be universally interpreted by the rules of modern theology and we are to exclude all the earlier theologians, mystics, and saints who thought through and inwardly experienced the truths of Scripture and held fast to their outer expression in dogmas? We would only do that if we are seeking to locate the blame for these interpretations in our cultural institutions rather than in our own thinking consciousness. Only when we permeate the exoteric with the esoteric do we get something whole and all our judgments in the World should strive for wholeness.
The quote you provide from Origen is fascinating. Of course much of what Origen said was viewed with suspicion and declared as heretical by the latter church councils. But I'd love to know how much the sense of a spiritual Gospel (whatever is meant by this term) permeated the thinking of the early church and of Jesus' teaching itself versus "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" which became the central teaching of Christianity.
Yes, that is a great question to explore and we should do so
before casting out our judgments. Again, we can only say "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" became the "central teaching of Christianity" if we have excluded everything 'not seen', or even things seen but not paid attention to, from the teaching. Everything is fluid, mobile, in process of development through rhythms of descents and ascents and the more we deepen our own intuitive thinking, the more we will notice how the 'teaching' once was and could again be much more than we currently assess it to be.
From a mathematical conceptual perspective, projection is not a bijective function - there is not a one-to-one relationship between the domain and range. For example a 3-D point (1,2,3) may project to a 2-D plane as (1,2) but so may (1,2,4). From the 2-D point (1,2) one can't uniquely map back to 3-D - one can't determine whether to traverse back to (1,2,3) or (1,2,4) or to (1,2,5) for that matter.
What I'm trying to get at with this analogy is that the creeds and dogmas lie in the "2-D plane" in the minds of the formulators and the faithful. The virgin birth is a proposition, Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit without sexual intercourse. Hell is a proposition, there exists a bad postmortem place or state reserved for those outside the church. These may will be manifestations of ideal archetypes as you say, but at the level they are understood by the church, one is doing a certain level of violence to the intent to suggest "you may say that, but I know you don't really mean that". There is no mapping back to 3-D from the perspective of the ways these teachings are manifest without being charged with, "No, that is not what I mean".
Anthony,
I think it would be really useful to get back to the PoF basics (or the various phenomenological illustrations provided by Cleric). Sometimes we read these things, feel like they have been understood (and maybe they were somewhat understood for a little while), and then put them aside and want to move on to new spiritual ideas, sort of like we do with our cultural traditions and heritage, but then we fall back into old habits of thinking which reveal that we have not made concrete the principles of our first-person cognitive experience. It is clear to me that this is the most important factor in all spiritual development, far and away. I actually wouldn't recommend someone like Tomberg to anyone who hasn't first thoroughly worked through Steiner and his philosophical works, and perhaps some spiritual science as well. I hope it's clear that the real value of considering such things as the 'RCC creeds/dogmas' is in
testing our principled thinking activity and its approach to the World so as to constantly refine it. There is no value in simply arguing about what modern believers understand the content of dogmas to be or not to be.
A key part of cognitive phenomenology is
experiencing the weaknesses and limitations of our normal conceptual activity. Everything we encounter in the World is bound up with our flattened concepts, including our very sense of who we are as personalities. We can get a sense of this if we compare what we are able to think with our inner voice to what we are able to express to others with our outer voice. Everyone has probably experienced how much more clearly we can think to ourselves compared to when we speak our thoughts to others, i.e. how the latter seems extremely feeble and limited compared to the former. It is a similar relationship between our inner voice and our intuitive thinking, except, because the latter is normally not at all conscious, we aren't able to make the comparison since we have nothing to compare the inner voice to. But through the reasoned analogy, we can at least discern that our inner conceptual activity is prone to similar weaknesses and limitations as our capacity to outwardly express concepts we have thought through to others. The very act of putting intuitive realities into the inner voice renders the former something less substantial, less concrete, less serious, more frivolous and trivial. So in the face of such inherent limitations, how can we understand the purpose of our conceptual activity which is obviously necessary for our current existence?
Let's say we suddenly have the urge to drink and recklessly reach out for a cup on the table, knocking it over and spilling all its contents over the table. We perceive this event and it feeds back to our thinking consciousness, so now we have more
living cues for how to steer our spiritual activity going forward. We know to pay better attention, to be more deliberate, to be more in control of our passions, and so forth, so as to avoid negative consequences. We should understand
all forms we encounter in the same way, including our own bodies and our own soul-life that engages in conceptual activity. The feedback doesn't stop with our conscious ego but continues on to our higher self who is superconscious. How we adjust, adapt, react, etc. with our spiritual activity also feeds back to our higher self for the purpose of expanding
true knowledge and wisdom in our stream of becoming towards shared ideals. That wisdom is elaborated in the liminal spaces of sleep and is the very source of our continual development as humans. We can greatly deepen our sense of this stream if we approach all forms of the World, including cultural institutions and other living souls, with this higher purpose of inner perfection in our consciousness. Our higher spiritual activity is constantly and clumsily bumping into spiritual forms so that it can learn to better adapt its approach in the future, which is to say, to learn how to be more thoughtful, precise, deliberate, humble, grateful, and loving.
So in your mathematical analogy, the 2D plane is in
our mode of thinking and structural organization which shapes that thinking. It is never in the forms we encounter. When it comes to spiritual creeds and dogmas, it should be especially clear that we are dealing with supersensible ideas. Practically none of those formulations relate to the normal impressions or events we encounter on the sensory plane, but to the lofty redemptive activities of normally inconceivable spiritual beings. Our thinking habitually reduces the supersensible ideas it encounters to their
lowest common denominator, which for most people are sensory perceptions and paper-thin concepts. There isn't any form in the physical world that is not incarnating a supersensible idea - the very sense of
meaning that we feel indicates to us that whatever we are perceiving in thought has flowed in from the superconscious realms. Of course, we aren't speaking of "ideas" as floating abstractions but as actual beings and their relational activity. If we were to develop more imaginative thinking, then our lowest common denominator would be much more living and dynamic concepts.
I could also say the tree outside my house is a "proposition", asserting to me green colors, leafy shapes, a brown cylinder, and so forth. In my idealistic concepts reported by the inner voice, I may think to myself that it is a living being with ancient wisdom and noble qualities, but if I am honest with myself, those things are not
experienced in my normal interaction with the tree. The question is whether I am going to locate the source of that lack within the tree itself or whatever stands behind the tree, or rather I am going to locate the source within my own highly formatted cognitive experience? The materialist will have the hardest time understanding this question and what it is pointing to, even though it probably seems pretty obvious to everyone on this forum. When we move to the realm of culture and cultural forms, however, that idealist meets the same stumbling block as the materialist and fails to notice the similarity. One then attributes the flattened meaning of these cultural forms to the ideas themselves, such "the Church" or "the faithful" or "the propositions", rather than their own cognitive interaction with the ideas. We don't need clairvoyant perception of ideas to notice the flaw in this approach. As soon as we start asking the right questions and genuinely seeking the answers, all sorts of hard problems arise.
Who is 'the Church', who are 'the faithful', what are their spatial and temporal boundaries, and so forth? We will quickly find that any attempt to draw boundaries around supersensible ideas becomes arbitrary reflections of our own subjective preferences. A common retort is that "words (forms) have common meanings that we must adhere to". No,
spiritual activity has common meanings that we share and our task is to adapt the forms to the higher meanings that feedback to perfect our spiritual activity. At the end of the day, what you are arguing is really simple and can be summed up as, "there are a lot of people in the modern age who have not developed their interest in spiritual reality and are still immersed in abstract materialistic thinking, so they confuse their flattened perception of early Church ideas for the ideas-themselves". And in the process of making that argument or making it into something that actually influences the way you approach spiritual reality, you are adopting the exact same flattened perception for yourself. These are entirely self-sabotaging impulses that work up from the depths of the subconscious when we fear approaching the spiritual essence of natural and cultural forms that we encounter. It is a natural fear because we are, in fact, confronting new inner territory that has the potential of completely transforming our understanding of who we are and our way of life - "
the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom". This fear is working subconsciously or superconsciously, so we have no chance of deconditioning its habitual tyranny over our thinking activity apart from faithfully pursuing a concrete encounter with that activity itself. It is the beginning of Wisdom when we make it more conscious and into an instrument for our inner perfection.